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Delanceyplace.com's End
of Year Encore Week: This year a full week on creativity.
In
today's encore selection -- from Life by Keith
Richards with James Fox. The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards on writing songs.
For Richards, writing songs causes you to distance yourself, to become more
of an observer -- a bit of a Peeping Tom:
"One
hit requires another, very quickly, or you fast start to lose altitude. At
that time you were expected to churn them out. 'Satisfaction' is suddenly
number one all over the world, and Mick and I are looking at each other,
saying, 'This is nice.' Then bang bang bang at the door, 'Where's
the follow-up? We need it in four weeks.' And we were on the road doing two
shows a day. You needed a new single every two months; you had to have
another one all ready to shoot. And you needed a new sound. If we'd come
along with another fuzz riff after 'Satisfaction,' we'd have been dead in the
water, repeating with the law of diminishing returns. Many a band has
faltered and foundered on that rock. 'Get Off of My Cloud' was a reaction to
the record companies' demands for more -- leave me alone -- and it was an
attack from another direction. And it flew as well.
"So
we're the song factory. We start to think like songwriters, and once you get
that habit, it stays with you all your life. It motors along in your
subconscious, in the way you listen. Our songs were taking on some kind of
edge in the lyrics, or at least they were beginning to sound like the image
projected onto us. Cynical, nasty, skeptical, rude. We seemed to be ahead in
this respect at the time. There was trouble in America; all these young
American kids, they were being drafted to Vietnam. Which is why you have
'Satisfaction' in Apocalypse Now. Because the nutters took us with
them. The lyrics and the mood of the songs fitted with the kids'
disenchantment with the grown-up world of America, and for a while we seemed
to be the only provider, the soundtrack for the rumbling of rebellion,
touching on those social nerves. I wouldn't say we were the first, but a lot
of that mood had an English idiom, through our songs, despite their being
highly American influenced. We were taking the piss in the old English
tradition. ...
"And
because you've been playing every day, sometimes two or three shows a day,
ideas are flowing. One thing feeds the other. You might be having a swim or
screwing the old lady, but somewhere in the back of the mind, you're thinking
about this chord sequence or something related to a song. No matter what the
hell's going on. You might be getting shot at, and you'll still be 'Oh!
That's the bridge!' And there's nothing you can do; you don't realize it's
happening. It's totally subconscious, unconscious or whatever. The radar is
on whether you know it or not. You cannot switch it off. You hear this piece
of conversation from across the room, 'I just can't stand you anymore'...
That's a song. It just flows in. And also the other thing about being a
songwriter, when you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start
to become an observer, you start to distance yourself. You're constantly on
the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years, observing people,
how they react to one another. Which, in a way, makes you weirdly distant.
You shouldn't really be doing it. It's a little of Peeping Tom to be a
songwriter. You start looking round, and everything's a subject for a song.
The banal phrase, which is the one that makes it. And you say, I can't
believe nobody hooked up on that one before! Luckily there are more phrases
than songwriters, just about."
Author: Keith Richards with
James Fox
Title: Life
Publisher: Free Press
Date: Little Brown &
Company
Pages: 179-183
Life
by Keith Richards by Back Bay
Books
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